The site of the city, like its name, Copenhagen or merchants' harbour, is not romantic, though extremely convenient for travel and trade. It looks straight over the Sound to Sweden and the entrance to the Baltic; the arm of the sea that divides Zealand from the small island of Amager (p. 143) also penetrates the town and adds to the water-front available for wharves. It was on a little backwater of this channel that in the twelfth century Bishop Axel (Absalon) raised on Church lands a castle, which was called by his own name, to protect the merchants from the pirates infesting the Sound.[59] Little he suspected that round it would grow up a town to supplant his cathedral city. Copenhagen was made the capital in 1443 by Christopher, the Bavarian, just after he had been recognised as King in Sweden and Norway as well as in Denmark itself. He was not a popular monarch. The Swedes called him the stumpy little German, and he thought them a free-spoken folk. When men complained that pirates were ravaging the coasts and were probably supported by Eric, the king who had been deposed, Christopher answered that, having been deprived of three kingdoms, a man could hardly be blamed for stealing a dinner now and then. Perhaps if the dinners had been stolen from the palace and not from their own houses the people would more readily have seen the joke. Thus, Copenhagen is a mediæval town, but it has no buildings earlier than the creations of that most accomplished sovereign, Christian IV., who could sail a ship and navigate the fjords and swim and leap and fence and fight and ride and drive and speak many languages and explain the course of the stars and drink enough wine and beer to astonish the court of his brother-in-law, James I. of England. If he really designed the buildings that he raised, as it seems he truly did, he was also an architect of no mean power.